®Localization: The global pyramid capston

® The growing market of global information consumers

®Localization for the long tail: Part 1

®Adobe flash creation & Localization (tentative Title)

LOCALIZATION CORE FOCUS October/November 2012

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 43

Co

re F

ocu

s

Localization: The global

pyramid capstone

Richard Sikes

SSeveral years ago, I was called by a recruiter

to interview for a job with a major Canadian manufacturer of airplane components. It seems that the hiring manager had spotted the keyword globalization in my online résumé, and because the company was embarking on a globalization initiative, he thought I might be an ideal candi-date for the position. I went to the interview.

In short order, we determined that in their corporate uni-verse, globalization meant imprinting the stamp of how things were done in the mother ship organization on all associated organizations around the world. I quickly explained that in my international software development and marketing universe, globalization meant reaching out to understand what users in cultures other than my own desired and then to evangelize incorporating those attributes in products destined for those markets. Needless to say, it was a short interview!

The attitude displayed by the hiring company may be use-ful in some situations, but to me, it embodied much of what has given globalization a bad name. It also pointed to another issue that I have observed closer to home: even in our relatively knowledgeable and harmonious world of software localization, substantial discrepancies exist in what industry participants understand about how globalization differs from internation-alization, and how both of these two differ from localization (Figure 1).

GlobalizationMy definition of globalization stems from an experience I

had while serving as director of globalization for a large soft-ware company. When I took the job, one of the first things I was told was that Japan was a problem. Exactly why it was a problem was not clear to the hiring manager, since the company had recently completed a localization of the flagship product at great expense, and shouldn’t the office be pleased?

So, as one of my first tasks in my new job, I set about contact-ing the Japanese office to find out what was wrong with the product. After a relatively short delay, they responded with a list of 1,600 issues! I found this to be somewhat overwhelming, so I tried to focus in on prioritization. Due to some factors outside the scope of this article, the prioritization effort took some time, so the next actual event in the saga turned out to be a visit from two representatives from the Japanese office to our headquarters.

After we had gotten acquainted, they asked, “The document set for this product consists of 24 manuals, correct?” “Yes,” I replied. “And you have localized five of the 24 books?” “Yes,” I again replied, “in order to keep costs contained, our product management group decided that we would localize only those five.” “And the Reference Manual is not included in the five?” they asked. “Correct!” I confirmed. “Why not?” they asked. “The Reference Manual is the only one that we want in Japanese!”

It was immediately apparent to me that our product manage-ment team had made a decision that was based on insufficient due diligence. While the decision to localize the five manuals may have been appropriate for some target locales, it most certainly was not for Japan. In fact, the result was a double whammy. Not only was dissatisfaction created, but a substantial sum of money was wasted translating unwanted manuals. As it turned out, the missing manual was the one and only issue of importance; the remaining 1,599 identified deficiencies could have been lived with, for one release anyway, if only the desired manual had been translated.

This anecdote illustrates my point that globalization must, to some extent at least, involve a degree of investigation into what foreign markets require and, conversely, that international prod-uct development without globalization at its foundation is a recipe

Richard Sikes has been immersed in technical translation and localization for over 25 years. He

has worked on the supplier and the buyer side of the industry, and is known as an author, speaker and

mentor. He holds three academic degrees: a BA in fine arts, Diplom Betriebswirt (FH) and an MBA.

43-48 Sikes/CFshowcase #131.indd 43 9/20/12 11:03 AM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com44

for failure. For this reason, globalization builds the bottommost and widest tier in the pyramid that is the mental model described in this article. But globalization does not only consist of offshore market research. Rather, it should be considered more closely synonymous with overall corporate investment strategy. By this, I mean investment strategy in the widest sense of the concept — not only invest-ment in the financial sense, but the effort that employees invest in everything they do. Globalization should be considered a mindset as much as a task set.

I once was asked to prepare a con-sulting proposal to evaluate localization processes for a well-known and success-ful company in the telecom space. My proposal was not accepted at the time, however, because the company decided to purchase a content management sys-tem (CMS) for its English content prior to exploring its localization practices. It never occurred to management that han-dling localized content and adapting to localization workflows might be a critical factor in its choice of CMS, and thus glo-balization was not in the forefront of the decision-makers’ minds as the company considered this investment.

Based on the notion that globaliza-tion is a mindset, international market research is only one piece in a much larger mosaic and should not be carried out in isolation or “thrown over the wall” to another department, as is sometimes done with program code. Quite to the contrary, regional market considerations should be treated as an integral part of marketing plans created by a central-ized marketing organization. Target locales should be grouped in tiers based on quantitative analysis, and a business case mentality must prevail, especially in the case of emerging markets. This will promote product planning with diverse markets in mind.

Creating a business case for product investment requires additional layers of support in the finance or accounting departments. It has always amazed me to learn how many companies do not track their revenues with sufficient interna-tional granularity to know whether the criteria set out in business case justifica-tions are actually met. In my experience, it is sadly typical that companies do not know how much revenue can be attrib-uted to localized products. At best, they may know how much revenue comes from products sold in certain regions, but there is no distinction between English and localized products sold. This simply is not tracked, nor is there any infrastructure for tracking or mining such vital data. Most companies either “fly blind” based on imperfect, unverified assumptions, or they employ the “localize for whomever screams the loudest” method of decision-making. This is partly an offshoot of the practice of sales personnel being compen-sated by revenue rather than profitability, and it may be considered an unnecessary burden during periods of robust business growth. However, in leaner times such as we have as of this writing, it is a short-sighted policy.

An additional attribute of the glo-balization mindset is the conceptual treatment of English product offerings as a subset of a generic, locale-neutral product. This is a tough mental leap for most North Americans to make, although there is hope on the horizon. The growing influence of the Hispanic population, for example, has caused numerous US-based businesses to consider Spanish as a lan-guage with an importance and personal-ity of its own approaching that of English. This, by definition, requires a whole new level of awareness on the part of strategic planners.

In the software world, target markets are generally farther afield, and compa-

nies are represented by offices located abroad. These offices are valuable sources of information but, all too often, the information flow is in one direction only — from headquarters to the field. This is counterproductive. In a world where information is power, the globalization-oriented company cultivates a culture of ongoing and extensive liaisoning with resources all over the world, intelligently leveraging information gleaned from that interaction by folding it into up-front product planning.

The choice of representation in foreign markets is also very much a part of glo-balization. There are many options; chan-nel strategy is a long-term decision with many implications. One company that I know of has blithely opened and closed offices in Japan multiple times based on short-term results, apparently unaware that each vacillation in policy further undermined their credibility with local partners. While companies presumably never enter markets with the intention of failing, they frequently do fail to proac-tively consider an exit strategy in their up-front planning. Even this pessimistic, risk-oriented activity belongs to due dili-gence activities of globalization.

InternationalizationInternationalization, the act of mak-

ing a company’s products localizable, is sometimes called localization engineer-ing. This latter term is unsatisfactory for several reasons, most prominently because it implies that the task set is different than core development and, by extension, done by different people and, perhaps, at a different time. But it is also not broad enough. Internationalization need not only refer exclusively to cod-ing practices as localization engineering implies; it might also be applied to such tasks as allowing sufficient white space in source documentation for text expansion

GLOBALIZATIONExpansion of marketing strategies to address regional requirements of all kinds

INTERNATIONALIZATIONEngineering a product to enable efficient adaptation to local requirements

LOCALIZATIONAdapting software and accompanying materials to suit target-market locales

Figure 1 (left): The global pyramid. Figure 2 (right): The cost of localization increases if internatioinalization and globalization have not been done properly.

GLOBALIZATION(Localization enablement)

INTERNATIONALIZATION(Business decisions)

LOCALIZATION(Adaptation/translation)

Visible costgeneration

Invisible costgeneration

43-48 Sikes/CFshowcase #131.indd 44 9/20/12 11:03 AM

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 45

or architecting a website so that localized

content can be easily added.

When performed proactively, interna-

tionalization is conceptually very similar

to a real option. A real option is the right

or the ability, but not the obligation, to

do something at some point in the future.

One purchases this future advantage

through a current investment, and hence

it has a calculable dollar value. Think of

an entrepreneur who purchases a plot

of land alongside a country road where,

someday, residential development will

occur. She builds a small service station

and car dealership. She doesn’t invest

too much money in the current facil-

ity because she doesn’t know exactly

when the development will occur and, of

course, there is always some risk that it

might not. But what she does do is buy an

option to purchase a parcel of land next

door at a predetermined price at some

future date. This guarantees that she can

expand the facility if she wishes, but does

not obligate her to purchase the land if

the development does not materialize.

Within the context of product develop-

ment, proactive internationalization simply

provides the option for a company to cost-

effectively localize at some future time.

Future localization of proactively interna-

tionalized products becomes much more

cost-effective because product components

do not have to go through a disruptive

and time-consuming retrofitting process to

support a decision to launch sales in a new

market. Avoidance of the disruption causes

turnaround time from decision to delivery

to be substantially shorter, and therefore

revenue gains occur sooner.

Internationalization of software con-

sists of three basic task types, each sup-

ported by numerous subtasks. The first of

these is the removal of cultural assump-

tions from software design. The second is

architectural separation of the presenta-

tion layer from the business logic layer.

The third is implementation of support

for global norms such as character sets or

accounting procedures.

Removal of cultural assumptions is

somewhat easier said than done. Such

assumptions are not made by software

developers out of malice but, rather,

through understandable ignorance, albeit

also sometimes out of time pressure.

Many North Americans are unfamiliar

with norms in other countries. For exam-

ple, developers trained at US institutions

simply may not realize that decimal sepa-

ration is actually indicated by commas

in much of the world. Unfortunately, few

university computer science departments

teach the principles of internationaliza-

tion, so one can hardly fault the gradu-

ates of those institutions. Another highly

prevalent category of cultural assump-

tions are those surrounding generic lin-

guistic issues. Lack of understanding of

text expansion is one of these, as is how

unresolvable grammatical paradoxes can

be created by string concatenation.

There is a plethora of issues here but,

for simplicity’s sake, let it be said that the

goal of internationalization is to create

a locale-neutral product. This is done

by creating virtual “layers” of program

code that are discrete from one another.

These layers have different functions.

The “presentation” layer is that which the

user sees and interacts with. The “busi-

ness logic” layer is the area of code that

is the functional “guts” of the program.

In simple words, that’s where the pro-

gram does whatever it does. There may

also be a “database” layer, where data is

stored and from where it is retrieved. In

Core Focus Showcase: Localization

Localization & Web Design Baltic & European Languages

• Technical translation• Software, website and game localization• Medical translations• Language quality services

- language quality assessment- language testing- terminology management, glossary creation- language style guide development- literary editorship- proofreading

• Voice recording • Website designSend your request with the password

“Multilingual” and get a 10% discount for your first localization project!

LingmasterRiga, Latvia

info@lingmaster.com • www.lingmaster.com

Adobe Systems Inc.San Jose, California, USA

techcomm@adobe.com www.adobe.com

The Future of TechComm is Here!

Adobe® Technical Communication Suite 4 is a powerful, integrated toolkit with single-source authoring, rich multimedia integration, and multichannel, multiscreen HTML5 publishing capabilities. Create XML/DITA content natively with Adobe FrameMaker® 11. Publish virtually anywhere using Adobe RoboHelp® 10. Deliver engaging, interactive content with graphics, demos and more using Adobe Illustrator® CS6, Adobe Captivate® 6 and Adobe Presenter® 8. Rapidly collaborate with review-capable PDF documents.

APAC Localization and Translation Experts

Empowering global communications since 1997, EC Innovations is a leading provider of language and technology solutions to the world’s largest and most recognized companies.

With offices around the globe and linguists in 100+ countries, we help our clients grow their international business.

By leveraging the benefits of a true global communication supply chain, we empower them to improve their global brand recognition, increase efficiency and speed time-to-market, all while reducing costs.

EC Innovations, Inc.Boston, Chicago, Denver, Beijing

service@ecinnovations.comwww.ecinnovations.com

43-48 Sikes/CFshowcase #131.indd 45 9/20/12 12:20 PM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com46

most programs, data is transferred back and forth between these layers, so it is not only the program code that defines operations within these layers that is important, but also the transport mecha-nisms between the layers that require scrutiny for internationalization support.

One problem occurs when these lay-ers are not cleanly separated from one another. Symptomatic of this kind of problem is when localization of the pre-sentation layer causes malfunction within the business logic layer. An example I once encountered was the usage of the terms high, medium and low from the presentation layer which were taken into the business logic layer for comparison with the volume settings that modems reported using those same English words. One can easily imagine what happened when the presentation layer was trans-lated: the comparison test failed every time because the presentation layer used different words, resulting in the inability of the user to accurately determine or set the modem volume.

An example of problems resulting from poorly internationalized transport mechanisms is another issue I recently encountered. The product consisted of a Windows client that drew its strings from a UNIX back-end server and also used a similar UNIX server to store data. The developers failed to realize that there are

character encoding differences between the two operating systems. The code that transferred data back and forth between these two platforms therefore failed to properly convert strings pulled from the UNIX server to populate the user interface (UI), resulting in a nonsensical UI. It also failed to properly store and return data entered by the user. Since some of the data entered was the user’s password, logging on to the application failed when the user name or password contained characters corrupted by the transport process.

Fortunately, many of these kinds of functional problems can be easily exposed by pseudo-localization. This technique involves using software tools to simulate translation of presentation layer program code that is then sent for testing. This brings up the subject of when, in the development process, testing for international support should be car-ried out and how extensive it should be. Many companies push this into the func-tional area of localization, but it does not belong there. Even companies that do not localize may wish to sell their products in non-English-speaking locales. Therefore, the products should fully support the functional requirements of those locales.

Pseudo-localization is one strategy to proactively test for international support, but it cannot cover all cases. Functional

requirements need to be derived from the globalization strategy, as previously described, and then tested against during the core code development process.

One such example from my past involved 128-bit data encryption algo-rithms that were built into a product my employer produced at the time. Among other markets, the product was intended for sale in France. At that time, 128-bit encryption was illegal in France, so internationalization in this case included building in the capability to suppress this feature for French as well as for English product builds shipping to that region. While this example is somewhat exotic, internationalization of core products may come up in many other more mundane contexts, such as currency format sup-port, date and time formatting, business logic rules such as application of value-added tax and a wide range of other product attributes that have nothing to do with localization in the linguistic sense.

It is highly disruptive, time consuming and therefore expensive to go back and retrofit program code to be internation-alized after a product is released. This generally involves branching the code. One branch will contain developments of new features and bug fixes to currently available versions, and may not be inter-nationalized. The other branch contains changes to enable internationalization support. Then, at some point, the code must be merged and regression tested. Many companies follow this pattern, as pressure to release quickly to home-turf markets supersedes longer-range vision. But this is really akin to offloading development debt to the future. A far bet-ter and, in the long run, less expensive and more flexible practice is to accept a small amount of ongoing overhead to internationalize from day one in the development cycle. This ensures two vital factors: flexibility to localize quickly at any time and a gradual lessening of the internationalization learning curve as developers incorporate best practices into their daily work.

So far, we have discussed interna-tionalization primarily in the context of software coding, but a quick detour to other areas of product develop-ment is worthwhile. One that comes to mind immediately is allowing suf-ficient white space in documentation to absorb language growth without causing pagination changes. This is rather like UI

43-48 Sikes/CFshowcase #131.indd 46 9/20/12 11:03 AM

Automated Flash File Localization

Rationalize Flash localization workflow.

Forget copy and paste! Use our new service to automatically export text from Flash files into XLIFF, so you can use usual localization and editorial processes, such as TMs. These functions give you even more:

• Automatically import localized strings back into the Flash file

• Automatically synchronize translations in updated Flash files

• Create bilingual glossaries by pushing a button

Naturally, we can take care of your entire localization project.

Seschat GmbH Typographie und Lokalisierung

Starnberg, Germanyinfo@seschat.de • www.seschat.com

Localization into South-East Asian Languages

Vnlocalize is one of the biggest and most reliable translation and software localization vendors in Asia. We have more than 50 inhouse employees in Hanoi, Bangkok, Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur offices and provide professional localization services for Vietnamese, Indonesian, Thai and Malay languages.

Our process follows EN 15038 and our quality is guaranteed by ISO 9001:2008 certification.

Are you looking for an Asian language service provider? Contact us now at vnlocalize.com and experience our professional services.

VnlocalizeHanoi, Vietnam • Bangkok, Thailand

Jakarta, Indonesia • Kuala Lumpur, Malaysiasales@vnlocalize.com • vnlocalize.com

Capitalize on Our Local Presence

At ACP Traductera we aim to provide high quality translation and localization services into the Central and Eastern European languages. Quality, reasonable prices and close communication with our clients are the cornerstones of our professional services.

• Document Translation • Website and Software Localization• Interpreting• Desktop Publishing• MultimediaAlbanian, Armenian, Belarusian, Bosnian,

Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, English, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Kazakh, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

ACP TraducteraJindrichuv Hradec, Czech Republic

info@traductera.com • www.traductera.com

Core Focus Showcase: Localization

Since 1997 All Languages, DTP

Since 1997, Chinese Localization Center has provided translation and localization services from English, German, French, Spanish and Italian into Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Korean and Japanese. We maintain a resourceful team of qualified translators with good records to do translation and editing. I am an ATA certified translator from English into Chinese. We use Trados for all translation projects. We also provide DTP service.

Chinese Localization CenterParis, France • Berlin, Germany

Madrid, Spain • Rome, Italy jackln@chineselocalize.com

www.chineselocalize.com

Anzu Global Boston • New York • San Francisco

mklinger@anzuglobal.comwww.anzuglobal.com

Localization Staffing Services

We provide globalization staffing services for localization engineers, internationalization engineers, bilingual testers and localization managers.

We have twenty plus years of experience helping technology clients look for localiza-

tion personnel and helping candidates find globalization job opportunities.

The Market Leader in Technical Documentation!

The Crestec Group has a worldwide network of more than 20 offices spread all over Japan and Asia, Europe and the US that enables us to deliver translation and documentation services in 60+ languages in any possible format and in a wide range of subject areas including automotive, medical, consumer electronics and more. We also offer software localization, DTP and printing fulfillment services.

Contact Crestec Europe today because whatever your needs are, we have the solution for you!

Crestec Europe B.V.Amsterdam, The Netherlands

sales@crestec.nl • www.crestec.eu

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 47

43-48 Sikes/CFshowcase #131.indd 47 9/20/12 11:03 AM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com48

design. It is sometimes hard to convince technical writers that white space is their friend, but it is definitely the friend of the localizer and the CFO. Desktop pub-lishing is expensive; a lot of time and money can be saved if translated docu-mentation does not require repagination. Not having to repaginate can mitigate another unfortunate phenomenon that sometimes occurs: the separation of screenshots from descriptive text. In recent years, we have moved away from extensive documentation sets, but in the “olden days” when I cut my localization teeth, hard-coded page references were a big problem. These always had to be double-checked and adjusted in the final localized books because language growth caused the original page refer-ences to be inaccurate. Better authoring software, topic-based authoring and the migration to electronic documentation in recent years have largely eliminated this problem in today’s localization arena.

And, finally, internationalization can be carried into such areas as col-lateral material. I remember one graphic design product that had an extensive tutorial whose central theme was about creating a poster promoting aluminum can recycling. Our Nordic office had to completely replace this tutorial because aluminum cans were not sold in its region; hence, customers would have no idea what the tutorial was about. Choice of a more internationally generic central theme might have saved the company, or at least that regional office, a sub-stantial amount of money. Then there is the whole area of advertising, whereby comparative ads are forbidden in some locales. Whether this kind of issue falls

into the category of internationalization or that of localization is less clear, and there are many associated questions, not the least of which is who owns corporate identity: headquarters or the regional offices.

LocalizationThis brings us to localization. It is no

accident that this area of the pyramid is the smallest. If globalization and inter-nationalization as previously discussed are thoroughly executed, then a founda-tion is built that ensures that the effort required for localization is minimized. But let’s look at what localization is. I prefer the following definition: localiza-tion is the process of adapting products and accompanying materials to suit a target-market locale with the goal of making the product transparent to that locale, so that native users interact with it as if it were developed there and for that locale alone.

Given that globalization defines a product’s requirements and internation-alization makes a product localizable, localization simply becomes a matter of imposing regional context upon a locale-neutral product. By definition, this usually involves translation, but it may not. For example, the creation of Microsoft Money 98 for the Canadian market required authoring of content that was relevant to Canadian wealth management, many attributes of which are different from its American counterpart. In this context, content creation was localization, not internationalization, although no transla-tion was involved. Internationalization was the product design that allowed effortless substitution of Canadian con-

tent in place of the original American content.

Localization may involve imposing functional constraints on products. Earlier in this article I mentioned a case involving 128-bit encryption. The generic, interna-tionalized version of the product could have either 128-bit or 64-bit encryption enabled. The localized version had only 64-bit encryption available to the user, and most of the product shipped to the locale was also translated into French.

The notion held by many a senior manager is that localization is excessively expensive. This is because cost generation in the globalization and internationaliza-tion layers of the pyramid is not readily visible. But inefficiencies created by poorly executed upstream activities adversely affect those downstream, resulting in greater overall cost (Figure 2). If company management complains that localization costs are too high, then the first place to look is not at the localization activities or unit prices but, instead, at the bottom and second layers of the pyramid. Unfor-tunately, this is far too frequently not well understood by C-level management.

Client-side localization project man-agers and solution architects at larger technology and linguistic service vendors tend to be the corporate resources that have the broadest viewpoint and greatest understanding of how the layers in the pyramid model affect one another. There are numerous strategies that may be employed to evangelize the relationship between the model’s layers.

I envision the localization manager in a fragile canoe paddling upstream from a sea of localized deliverables, straining against the prevailing corporate current of conflicting goals and budgetary con-straints, navigating through rapids and narrows of internationalization, all the way to the distant peaks of globalization decisions that reside in some faraway corner office. Indeed, a lot of effort is nec-essary and the journey can be daunting. It can require perseverance and patience. But it can be equally fascinating if one is not afraid to get wet once in a while! Along the way, the pyramid model can be used as a secure anchor as well as a powerful, easily understood metaphor for charting direction and progress. May it serve you well! M

This is an updated version of an arti-cle that was published in MultiLingual’s April/May 2009 Getting Started Guide.

43-48 Sikes/CFshowcase #131.indd 48 9/20/12 11:03 AM

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 49

Co

re F

ocu

s

The growing market of

global information consumers

Benjamin B. Sargent

EEnterprise translation buyers scrutinizing

their annual spend should feel confident that

the potential return on investment for trans-

lation and localization has expanded rapidly,

and is likely to continue doing so for the fore-

seeable future. Figure 1 demonstrates how the

long tail of languages plays out online in order

to reach worldwide customers. However, the

global information revolution goes way beyond

that, and by extension it is clear that printed

word translations also show an expanding

commercial value due to the global explosion

of information consumers.

While in Western Europe and North America, the so-called middle class appears to be in crisis, everywhere else in the world it is growing quickly. Middle-class households in Africa will double by 2020. The middle class in India will rise from 150 to 600 million by 2030. Goldman Sachs predicts that two billion people will join the middle class by 2030.

Joining the ranks of the middle class means gaining access to computers and mobile devices with internet access. In turn, access to the internet changes our engagement with content. Becoming an information consumer changes how we learn about products and services. As consumers and employees, we begin to access services online, in private networks, or on mobile phones. We engage with products and services, with companies and brands via digital content, and by joining social networks we enter into broader circles of influence with other information consumers. Participating in online social networks alters how we share what we know with others. Our exposure

to products, services, brands and economic exchanges radically increases.

In the past two years, the economic potential addressable through online communication has risen from $36.5 trillion to $44.6 trillion, a staggering sum. Only a third of that total is addressable in English as a native tongue. As more of the world’s people adopt the ways of the information consumer, the value of translation will continue to grow. The number of “big languages” on the web has grown from an initial few; now product and service companies require at least 12 languages to reach 80% of the online population. It takes 13 languages to address 90% of the world’s online spending power. The long tail of languages is starting to assert its power.

Social media marketing, with its significantly more effective and cost-efficient means of influencing both consumer and business purchasing behaviors, will soon require coordinated activities in 30, 40 and eventually 50+ languages. While the task of managing product and information releases across so many languages is daunting, market planners must recognize that the greater effort is already being offset by increased benefits derived from the expanding e-GDP values for each translation done.

It’s high time for enterprise planners and marketers to get serious about language assets and managing the translation business process. For language service providers and other localization practitioners it’s a good time to be in the language business. M

Benjamin B. Sargent is a senior analyst and content

globalization strategist with Boston-area research

and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory.

49-50 SargentCSA#131.indd 49 9/20/12 11:04 AM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com50

Outstanding

Localization

Translation & Localization

I translation and localization

I proofreading

I company-specif c glossaries

I post-editing services

I project management

I desktop publishing

Your German Language Specialist

Cologne, Germany Tel +49(0)221 801 928-0 www.rheinschrift.de

Figure 1: The languages needed to reach the online world.

49-50 SargentCSA#131.indd 50 9/20/12 11:04 AM

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 51

Co

re F

ocu

s

Localization for

the long tail: Part 1

David Filip

TThis is Part 1 of a series focusing on long tail

localization.

Traditionally, volunteerism and professionalism have been perceived in opposition. Nevertheless, in present day collaborative environments, this distinction is increasingly blurred. By no means could we define a volunteer as someone who delivers lower quality. Often volunteers working for various good causes are motivated to perform at their very best standard, as they are emotionally engaged with the causes and, because their work is often highly visible, they would not dare to perform suboptimally.

The cluster of notions related to the term prosumer plays a prominent role here. Prosumer is a portmanteau word first coined by futurologist Alvin Toffler in the early 1980s as a contraction of proactive consumer, and most often refers to hobbyists who per-form basically on par with professionals. In the context of covering the long tail of minority languages, prosumer localizers are proac-tive, as they do not rely on official institutions or corporations to create specialized terminology. They also more often than not display a high degree of professionalism.

It can be said that survival of languages under a certain threshold number of speakers depends on formation of the prosumer localization communities. The market forces generated, say, by less than a million speakers are not strong enough to fund commercial localization and translation of key technology stacks and bodies of knowledge. The activism of prosumers is driven by highly emo-tional factors, and activist prosumers are usually very well aware

that their effort is the only force that can put their mother tongue into the context of full-fledged cultural languages — in other words, to prevent its slow and unmanaged death. Localizations of Wikipe-dia, core open source or corporate technology stacks (such as Linux operating system, Microsoft Windows, gmail, Libre Office, Firefox) are just a few examples of formational localization projects that have been known to lead to conceptions of modern technology-ready versions of minority languages in emerging regions.

In our industry the volunteerism and prosumer debates had often been grotesquely shrunk into the so-called issue of transla-tion crowdsourcing, and professional translators feel threatened by the price pressure of the “free alternatives” to their professional services. This is, of course, an oversimplification, because building a working machine translation (MT) or crowdsourcing solution is known to have steep investment requirements and despite popular belief there is ongoing cost associated with keeping them running. This is also the reason why prosumerism in localization cannot be confined to the area of translation. Volunteerism needs to perme-ate the whole organizational structure or network to keep minority localizations running in terms of infrastructure coordination, but also the baseline standardization of orthography, terminology, scripts (Unicode), locale specifics (Unicode Common Locale Data Repository — CLDR) and so on.

The topic of prosumerism is prominent in China (both PRC and ROC), both in the context of the translation industry and in general. Comparative studies by Taiwanese scholars of crowd-sourced (in PRC) and professionally translated and edited content (in ROC) offer good lessons here, similar to Miguel A. Jimenez-Crespo’s study of the Spanish Facebook translator community or another study by CNGL’s Magdalena Dombek about the Polish one. Jimenez-Crespo shows that Spanish Facebook has achieved the feeling of an indigenous Spanish page, and we know from public Facebook presentations that the price tag is not free. Therefore, it is important for minority languages’ survival to be represented in localization prosumer communities rather than just translation communities. Shared technology and infrastructure play an impor-tant role, and in turn the cost of these can be driven down by standardization — not only language, alphabet and script standard-ization but also project and resource exchange formats. There are many players in localization crowdsourcing in emerging markets,

David Filip is a researcher in next-generation localization project and process management and an interoperability standardization expert. The underlying research was supported by Science Foundation Ireland as part of a Centre for Next Generation Localisation (CNGL) project.

51-55 Filip #131.indd 51 9/20/12 11:04 AM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com52

including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, The African Network for Localization (ANLoc), Translators without Borders and The Rosetta Foundation. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the methods that are a must for economically nonviable minority lan-guages can be generalized and replicated with mature language communities. The

important ingredient is passion, and as Spanish speakers do not need to be anx-ious about the future of their language, they will prosumerize based on other pas-sions, such as other sorts of good causes or simply a passion for a product.

The previously mentioned Chinese studies show that the professional and

prosumer scenes differ in methods and values, but foremost in their goals. Because a prosumer translator of high tech news content strives to produce a document mirroring the original English source in its absolute difference, he or she tends to use literal translation as a conscious method for achieving this, and may resort to long and insightful translator notes to convey meaning that is outside of Chinese con-text and thus not within the intellectual grasp of the average interested reader. On the other end, the professional publisher strives to create an indigenous experience as if the news was originally written in Chinese for Chinese people. Compensation is a chief method; culturally unintelligible examples are replaced with local ones, and regionally irrelevant paragraphs are completely deleted. It is important to note that in many minority languages, unlike in Mandarin and other established languages, the compensation option simply may not exist, and a literal translation with bla-tant conveying of “otherness” is the only option. It is important to note that large translation projects such as Bible transla-tions, Shakespeare translations and so on played an extremely important formative role in the development and enrichment of languages. Nevertheless, before those formative projects, the then emerging lan-guages did not have indigenous methods of conveying new imagery and conceptual worlds. The literal translations that resulted enriched the language, much like now-emerging languages are being enriched by Wikipedia translations and major user interface translation projects.

Apart from volunteer translators, we need to look at the volunteerism in all involved job descriptions. In the

VolunteerTranslator

Translation

TranslationEnvironment

Reporting

Review Engineering

Collaboration

TranslationProject

ProjectManagement

Subject Matter Expert

VolunteerEngineer

VolunteerProject Manager

NGORepresentative

Figure 1: Actors of social localization.

Figure 2: No volunteer role is mutually exclusive.

Translator

Engineer ProjectManager

OrganizationalRepresentative

51-55 Filip #131.indd 52 9/20/12 11:04 AM

Core Focus

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 53

not-for-profit setting, any single actor can be an unpaid volunteer who can only ded-icate a fraction of a full-time equivalent to the cause in question. This is, however, not solely a nonprofit phenomenon. In the cor-porate world, many vital functions such as industry practice standardization, profes-sional forums and associations are driven by part-time volunteers. Big corporations do include such work in (rather rare) job descriptions or sponsor full-time chairs, editors and so on. This is, however, not at all the rule or even statistically significant. Much critical standardization work is in fact produced by dedicated volunteers, who despite representing their companies in the forums, work after hours because they want to. Subject matter experts and in-country reviewers in many corporate settings do work on the review tasks on top of their regular duties, and they need to be presented with the tasks in the most efficient way possible. For all this, the scal-ing up of localization processes that might be first considered to cover the long tail

is totally relevant for the mainstream, core processes.

Let us look at the involved actors based on The Rosetta Foundation requirements gathering with several global and regional not-for-profit and corporate players such as Kiva (a US microfinancing NGO), Adobe, ANLoc and so on.

The special roles defined as collaborat-ing actors in the basic use case for social localization in Figure 1 can be performed by overlapping sets of users. Figure 2 shows that no role is mutually exclusive, which means that any combination of the roles can be played by a single individual actor. In the context of covering the long tail of languages any one of them can be a volunteer.

Standardization challenges with emerging languagesSome emerging regions, prominently

Africa, now suffer from the hyperinflation of the notion of a language. To have its own language is a great weapon in the

struggle for self-determination of peoples. Many small groups of several hundred to several hundred thousand speakers come to assert their rights in the national poli-tics of their countries, coming for the first time out of their economic and political isolation. The local chiefs are rarely able or willing to see similarities, and the potential benefits of forming equivalences of their dialects with the ones of the neighboring chief, and thus force the standardization of their own language at the national level. They pick a script and alphabet and leave a PhD candidate with the task of figuring out the written form of their language as part of a linguistic program of a regional university or academy, and they return to their village victorious with their own language established. Thus, countries like Senegal end up with 37 languages for less than 13 million total speakers. I am aware that I may sound politically incorrect, but still, let us hope for some sort of consoli-dation for the sake of the African people themselves. The challenge of covering the

51-55 Filip #131.indd 53 9/20/12 11:04 AM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com54

long tail will not be less formidable for such consolidations. The small language communities would stand a much better chance of defending their indigenous cul-tural heritage if they joined standardiza-tion and localization forces among close dialects.

It is impossible to draw a clear and uncontroversial boundary between the extensions of the concepts of a language and a dialect. The reasons to consider dialects languages, and languages dialects, are rarely rational or otherwise based on scientific methods or facts. Homogenous languages spoken by moderate to small numbers of native speakers have been split under political pressure, and artificially imposed script variants introduced to support various geopolitical or religious claims. On the opposite end of the spec-trum, China and the Islamic world insist that Chinese and Arabic are homogenous

languages and thus politicians do not grant language status to large dialects spoken by many millions that would be considered languages according to Western under-standing. It is, however, well-known that the spoken dialects of many Chinese prov-inces, although officially the same Chinese, are mutually unintelligible and the identity of mainland Chinese is protected solely by the general intelligibility of the Simpli-fied Chinese characters invariably used to encode phonetically different morphemes of the same sense. The power of written language-driven standardization must not be underestimated.

Leaders of formative localization proj-ects should not underestimate the role of their project in shaping the emerging technology-ready language; they should be actively aware of it and as a result should strive to strike a balance with the official academic or government institu-

tion in charge of language matters. This all of course means extra cost. If this can-not be budgeted or otherwise covered or accounted for in collaboration with other stakeholders (such as self-appointed lan-guage stewards), there will be explosive issues during and after quality assurance cycles, as the omitted stakeholders will gradually come to see and wonder what has been produced.

Deep vs. shallow methodsThis is similar to and in some sense

an extension of the contrast between rule-based (RBMT) and statistical (SMT) methods in the area of MT. There is no single canonical solution to either of these controversies. Instead, we should think of them as functions of required quality and available resources, their kinds and price tags. As from the 1950s through the 1990s the computing resources were scarce and expensive compared to even highly qualified human labor, the natural MT paradigm was rule-based because the rules were simply being invented and encoded by a highly qualified and special-ized computational linguist. Some of the RBMT engines that had been developed for decades achieved remarkable quality on their pairs and domains. But in the mean-time, in clear correlation with the falling price of computing power and growing volumes of parallel corpora produced by translation memory (TM), the competing statistical paradigm gained prevalence. However, the limits of data are being hit in present day. On several commercially available general engine language pairs, there is not enough data on Earth to buy them a single additional point of BLUE or METEOR by the sheer power of statistics. Thus, hybrid approaches are gaining prev-alence and it can be said that all commer-cially viable solutions in 2012 are in some sense hybrid; the rules find their ways into the largely statistically built engines at various stages of engine development, be it at the stage of data selection; automatic or semi-supervised inference of syntactic trees or treelets; supervised identification of significant n-grams; introduction of runtime vocabularies; and so on.

MT is just one of many instances of machine learning that is used in the vast research area of natural language process-ing (NLP). One of the most prominent areas of NLP-based text analytics is senti-ment mining and monitoring. Sentiment recognition data analytics is about the

■■ If undertaking a project into a language yet unknown to you, perform research of the current standardization level of the language. What script(s) are used to write the language? Are all the important characters needed to write the language included in the current Unicode standard? Are the relevant locales in CLDR? Is there an academic or governmental language authority? Have your competitors been translating into the language? What is the size of Wikipedia in the language? Have operating systems been localized into that language? Are there viable input methods for the language?

■■ If the above information is not easily accessible by standard search methods, you should start your efforts with commissioning a feasibility study.

■■ Be open and flexible toward minority language communities. Pre-pare generalized self-serve localization packs for languages and locales that would not be reachable for you based on traditional market feasibility. Such a pack can buy you markets virtually for free and the loyalty generated by your open approach is priceless. The example here is the Basque community actively requesting to set up a fully self-serve Basque locale on Facebook.■■ Be aware of the infrastructure

and general education conditions. Tune

your tool stack to be usable in the given conditions. Combining multiple tool stacks is easier if they implement stan-dard exchange formats, such as XLIFF. There are generally two approaches here. First, bootstrap on what is available, synchronize work on modem connec-tions or only from time to time, such as when the translator gets to cycle to an internet café 50 kilometers away. Have a low-profile, sturdy, robust (as in bullet proof) multiplatform client or even an SMS based process. Second, you could create a fully controlled, full featured environment and bring your resources there. The cost of setup, training and maintenance is high; still some are will-ing to pay for maintaining control. This is what MultiCorpora did in a government sponsored project to empower the Inuk-titut community.

■■ Working with NLP or MT, try to use shallow solutions first. If it does not work, do a proper return on investment calculation before jumping on custom-ization. Even though local chiefs might insist that their languages are different, throwing data together might do the trick.

■■ Pay special attention to data hygiene upon standardized message formats, so that your multilingual infor-mation flows can be based on empirical data mining.

Takeaways

51-55 Filip #131.indd 54 9/20/12 11:04 AM

Core Focus

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 55

Kilgray TranslaTion

Technologies’

firsT TranslaTion Tool conference in The usa

san anTonio, Texas

January 31sT – february 1sT

2013

memoqfest.org | kilgray.com | sales@kilgray.com

Industry trends. Networking. Workshops.

most powerful response of the corporate players to the loss of control over “their” content. The first step to improving your image is actually to figure out if it needs improvement and, if there are negative sentiments around, what caused them and can they be remedied with anything that still is (more or less) under corporate control, such as feature development. Because of the extremely important role of sentiment mining in corporate deci-sion making, multinationals are often not willing to wait for deep methods to cover the long tail and are increasingly investing into shallow methods such as this for detecting exceptional (negative or positive) sentiments across a vast number of languages. As in many areas, the long-term viable solutions will be hybrid and most probably crowdsourced by passion-ate prosumers. As discussed previously, long tail language communities that won’t prosumerize will most probably perish, and therefore merely covering them with shallow methods will be of only ephemeral significance.

Business intelligence It is vital for long-term data hygiene

that multilingual content is designed with multidirectional (as in ordered pairs, not directionality of text) multilingual information flow in mind. Looking at any piece of content inside an organizational context, you should be able to tell if this piece of content was developed in the language in which it is now, if it is trans-latable or not, if it needs culture or locale specific treatment, if it was machine or human translated, eventually post-edited, if it passed any quality assurance steps and with what results.

This might sound like a utopian vision, but actually it is not. The key to global business intelligence without a central-ized and privileged monolithic hub clearly is the adoption of standardized message formats, and there are a number of core standards (such as XML and HTML), specialized vocabularies (such as XLIFF), various web services standards, and other core standards and repositories (such as Unicode and CLDR) that allow for the

building of such a permeating locationless intelligence. This picture is currently being perfected by the development of two major relevant next-generation specifications, OASIS XLIFF 2.0 and W3C ITS 2.0, which are set to produce semantically matching results due to their strong and explicit liaison interrelations.

Business intelligence must be collected to drive decisions on content creation strategies and workflows. Any piece of information created anywhere within a multinational distributed structure must become the subject of an overall multi-lingual content intelligence platform. We must qualify that this platform cannot and must not be thought of in terms of a monolithic tool stack as is often found in the translation management system cat-egory. It is a natural development of the concept of an open web platform; it is a platform of common interests and match-ing process-oriented semantics. This full content life cycle must be considered when making strategies for massively multilin-gual content in any setting. M

51-55 Filip #131.indd 55 9/20/12 11:04 AM

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com56

Core

Foc

us

Adobe Flash localization Manish Kanwal & Akulaa Agarwal

LLocalizing structured content through trans-lation management tools is generally a simple process. However, localizing unstructured con-tent, such as text appearing in Adobe Flash videos, is not easy. This means that tracking translation efficiencies for unstructured content is all the more difficult.

There are, however, some best practices that could be applied to any localization of text or other assets in Adobe Flash files. A compilation of these best practices was prepared from an independent study done for a complex Adobe software prod-uct, aided by Jakub Škrabal and Petr Knápek from Moravia. This article covers some aspects of Flash localization, including creating English content correctly, so that it is internationalized and thus localization friendly. Following these best practices can lead to effort and cost savings, which when considered in context of the number of languages could be sizeable.

Extracting textThe ease or difficulty of localizing Flash animation depends

on the globalization readiness of the source, which is usually an English Flash animation file. During the localization process, all text requiring translation is extracted from the source anima-tion. It is then replaced by localized text and modified accord-ing to the style guide, including choice of font size and so on. In some cases, text requiring localization is not included in the text layers but is present as a graphic embedded in an image. Therefore, the source animation must be fixed first to make it ready for localization.

As a first step in the localization of Flash animation, all text requiring local-ization should be extracted from the animation. This step is made possible by commercial tools, such as Flash Local-ization Tool, or by renaming the source

Manish Kanwal is a program manager at Adobe Systems with experience spanning across almost ten countries and multiple industry verticals.

Akulaa Agarwal completed her bachelor’s degree in information technology from Delhi University, India.

She has worked with Adobe Systems since 2004.

Figure 1: Example of pseudo-localization. All strings that were

externalized in a text layer have been replaced by the X string. “What’s new” was not replaced. Figure 2: Screenshot localized into Russian.

“What’s new” is correctly localized. In this case, the source was fixed, and the localizable text in the button was externalized.

56-60 Adobe #131.indd 56 9/20/12 11:05 AM

Core Focus

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 57

Flash animation file as a ZIP archive, and then extracting all XML files from the library subfolder of the ZIP archive.

The Flash native format is a ZIP archive with a defined structure. A basic knowledge of this structure enables you to easily extract all text layers from the animation. Text layers in XML files can be found surrounded by the <characters>Your text</charac-ters> XML tags.

Besides storing the localizable text, the XML data stores information about the font size, font family and style. In most cases, the input parameters such as font family and size can be easily modi-fied to obtain the desired output fonts. More details about the Flash XML file will follow in the coming sections.

Pseudo-localizationThe first best practice is to apply

pseudo-localization to identify local-izable text which is not in text layers and externalize it. This ensures that the animation is ready for localization and that all text requiring translation resides in the text layers. Ideally, this is to be done by the team creating the English Flash file.

During this process, the text in the text layer requiring translation is replaced by predefined strings such as X. After doing so, original XML files in the library subfolder are replaced by modified ones. When this action is complete, the file is regenerated and played back in Flash player. By play-ing this rendered file, one can easily locate strings that were not pseudo-localized. Text originally present in the text layers is displayed as X in this rendering. If there is still any readable text, it usually comes from embedded videos, graphics or an ActionScript. Examples of pseudo-localization are depicted in Figures 1 and 2.

Figure 3 (left above): Only the first layer is visible. Figure 4 (right above): The second part of text is visible, completing the sentence. Figure 5 (below): Complex string in one

text layer only. There is no need to put text in yellow into a separate text layer.

56-60 Adobe #131.indd 57 9/20/12 11:05 AM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com58

Text layersThe second best practice is to avoid

breaking down a string into multiple text layers. If any text formatting is required, do it in only one text layer.

At times it is necessary to have dif-ferent animations for different parts of a single string. More often than not,

authors choose different ways of insert-ing such a text in Flash animation.

There can be many ways to insert text into Flash animation. However, one must choose between them and stick to only one approach for a given Flash project to ensure smooth local-ization. Avoid representing text using

a scalar vector graphic. In this case it will appear correctly in the anima-tion, but will not have anything cor-responding in the XML file. Therefore, it is recommended that you use only text layers.

Also avoid breaking a single string into multiple strings, unless spe-cifically required. Any separation in multiple substrings will result in the same amount of separation in the XML file. This is known as text segmenta-tion, and can lead to loss of context during translation and thus incorrect localization.

Figures 3 and 4 describe the issue of text segmentation. The intended text is “Loyal customers like you save with spe-cial upgrade pricing. Adobe Photoshop Elements & Adobe Premiere Elements is now a perfect 10!” However, the under-lined text reading “special upgrade pric-ing” has been separated as a substring for formatting issues and has been kept as a separate layer. The latest version of Flash allows authors to keep strings with different font family, color, style, size and so on in one text layer. Figure 5 illustrates an example of a complex string (part of the text is in yellow with bigger font) in one text layer.

Keep in mind that layer separation will result in the segmentation of strings in the XML file. The translator will see them as two separate strings without them being related, as in Figure 6.

With all this in mind, it is recom-mended that you don’t split a string into smaller substrings, no matter what tool you use for creating Flash anima-tions. Rather, keep them in one text layer whenever possible. The advan-tages of this approach are that the string remains well ordered in the XML file, and translators get a better context during translation, hence improving the linguistic quality of the translations.

Embedded videosFlash animations often contain embed-

ded videos. The best way to localize embedded videos in Flash is to extract all text from the video, localize that text, replace it with the translated text and cre-ate a localized video.

For the given Flash file, embedded vid-eos can be found in the Flash object library under the Embedded Video type.

If there are any segments to be local-ized within the embedded videos and only

Figure 6: Representation of substrings in the XML file. Substrings are enclosed in the <DOMStaticText> tag inside the XML file.

56-60 Adobe #131.indd 58 9/20/12 11:05 AM

Core Focus

www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 59

the Flash file has been provided, it is dif-ficult and time consuming to localize the strings in it. When the video is carefully analyzed, in some cases the text can be “faked,” which is not a good localization practice. Faking normally involves the fol-lowing steps:

First, screenshots are taken for each motion in the animation. Second, English characters are removed from each screen-shot by using tools like Adobe Photoshop. Third, English characters are replaced by localized text of similar appearance — font size, color and so on. These screenshots are then integrated to compose a video with localized text.

This approach works only when the portion of the video behind the text is static. As mentioned earlier, this is not an efficient localization method and is limited to static videos. If the text is moving very fast (as in an animation) or text is static but the background is changing equally fast, it is almost impossible to follow this process. For this type of file, it is necessary to spend many hours to localize just a few seconds of video.

Thus, when you have a rapidly changing background on which the text is superimposed, localization can be a harrowing experience if the source video file and the externalized text layers are not available to the translators. How-ever, with an editable video project file, the translators can modify all text lay-

ers inside embedded videos and prepare localized versions of those videos.

Again, it is recommended to not embed assets in videos if you want to localize them. Instead, provide them separately.

Screenshot animationOne can create an animation inside

the Flash project from a series of screen-

shots. See an example of a screenshot series in Figure 7 and Figure 8. In this case, as the timeline drifts from left to right, the animated text on the surfboard starts to appear. Figure 7 represents when the timeline has not started, and Figure 8 represents when the timeline has ended.

Text in the screenshots is localizable, and a source Photoshop file with editable

Figure 7 (left): Screenshot series. You can see both the preview of the screenshot and the sequence of screenshots in the Flash timeline. Figure 8 (right): End of the screenshot series in the Flash animation. Text is animated

within the series, and every screenshot adds one letter of the text into the animation.

56-60 Adobe #131.indd 59 9/20/12 11:05 AM

Core Focus

| MultiLingual October/November 2012 editor@multilingual.com60

text layer needs to be created. Once this step is complete, the English text is to be replaced with the translated one.

However, if the source Photoshop file is not provided, the only way to create a localized version is to remove the English text, for example by using tools like Photoshop, and replace, say, the first English character with a local-ized character at the same axis in the image and take a screenshot. Then you have to repeat this for the next English character until all are done. Finally, superimpose all the screenshots on each other and set the time so that it matches English animation.

It should be obvious that doing this for every character is a significant effort. Therefore, if you have an editable source

Photoshop file available, make sure you provide it to your local-ization engineer.

For any localizable text within a graphic (graphical text), it is important to provide the source English assets. If the source editable asset is not provided, it has to be recreated by the localization vendor to be able to replace text with a localized version and create a rendering for the Flash project. During recreation of the editable source asset, some effects can be overlooked and hence missed in the localized version.

Buttons and active layersIt is vital to keep all buttons with

localizable texts as Movie Clip type in a Flash project and not to use differ-ent Flash types to simulate the button functionality. If the button functional-ity consists of multiple Flash types, it

is likely that during post processing, the engineers may unintentionally use incorrect relative alignment of these objects inside frames. This may impact the Flash file functionally, and in some cases, render it corrupt.

An example of a corrupted button is shown in Figure 9. Here, the button consists of graphical text in the yel-low box and an active layer (shown as a blue frame), which plays the role of “clickable” area. You may observe that the box is not aligned with the active layer and the left side of this button is not clickable. Additionally, the right side incorrectly contains an overlapped active area.

Active layers outside of the button boundary in Flash can lead to misalign-ment within the localized version of Flash. It requires one to resize button and active layer objects with every change in the number of text charac-ters in the button. Creating buttons as Movie Clip will avoid such issues in Flash animations.

FlickeringIn some Flash players, localized text

can exhibit a flickering effect. That is, text is moved by one or a few pixels to the left, right, up or down when the cursor is hovered over it.

See Figure 10 for more details. Giriș’e geri shifts slightly at a low level compared to ri dön and the rest of the text when the mouse is hovered over it.

The only way to fix the flickering issue is to convert text layers within the localized Flash project into curves and then render them into the final format. Graphical texts (curves) do not show the flickering effect.

Flickering is most often visible in older versions of Flash players. It is rec-ommended that you use the latest Flash players that do not display this effect. Otherwise, localized text layers have to be converted into curves before rendering into the final format. M

Figure 9 (left) : Corrupted “What’s new” button. Active layer (blue frame) is not aligned with yellow box.

Figure 10 (above): Flickering in detail.

56-60 Adobe #131.indd 60 9/20/12 11:05 AM

T

October/November 2012 • www.multilingual.com

Core Focus: Localization

he ever-growing, easy international access to information, services and goods underscores the importance of language and cultural awareness. What issues are involved in reach-ing an international audience? Are there technologies to help? Who provides services in this area? Where do I start?

Savvy people in today’s world use MultiLingual to answer these questions and to help them discover what other questions they should be asking.

MultiLingual’s eight issues a year are filled with news, techni-cal developments and language information for people who are interested in the role of language, technology and translation in our twentyfirst century world. A ninth issue, the annual Resource Directory and Index, provides valuable resources — companies in the language industry who can help you go global. There is also a valuable index to the previous year’s magazine editorial content.

Two issues each year include a Core Focus such as this one, which are primers for moving into new territories both geo-graphically and professionally.

The magazine itself covers a multitude of topics including those below.

TranslationTranslators are vital to the development of international and

localized software. Those who specialize in technical documents, such as manuals for computer hardware and software, industrial equipment and medical products, use sophisticated tools along with professional expertise to translate complex text clearly and precisely. Translators and people who use translation services track new developments through articles and news items in MultiLingual.

LocalizationHow can you make your product look and feel as if it were

built in another culture for local users? Will the pictures and colors you select for a user interface in France be suitable for users in Brazil? How do you choose what markets to enter? What sort of sales effort is appropriate for those markets? How do you choose a localization service vendor? How do you man-age a localization project? Managers, developers and localizers offer their ideas and relate their experiences with practical advice that will save you time and money in your localization projects.

InternationalizationMaking content ready for the international market requires

more than just a good idea. How does an international developer prepare a product to be easily adaptable for multiple locales? You’ll find sound ideas and practical help in every issue.

Language technologyFrom systems that recognize your handwriting or your speech

in any language to automated translation on your phone — lan-

guage technology is changing day by day. And this technology is also changing the way in which people communicate on a personal level — affecting the requirements for international products and changing how business is done all over the world.

MultiLingual is your source for the best information and insight into these developments and how they affect you and your business.

Global webEvery website is a global website because it can be accessed

from anywhere in the world. Experienced web professionals explain how to create a site that works for users everywhere, how to attract those users to your site and how to keep the site current. Whether you use the internet for purchasing services, for promoting your business or for conducting fully international e-commerce, you’ll benefit from the information and ideas in each issue of MultiLingual.

Managing contentHow do you track all the words and the changes that occur

in your documents? How do you know who’s modifying your online content and in what language? How do you respond to customers and vendors in a prompt manner and in their own languages? The growing and changing field of content man-agement, customer relations management and other manage-ment disciplines is increasingly important as systems become more complex. Leaders in the development of these systems explain how they work and how they interface to control and streamline content management.

And there’s much moreAuthors with in-depth knowledge summarize changes in the

language industry and explain its financial side, describe the challenges of communicating in various languages and cul-tures, detail case histories that are instructional and applicable to your situation, and evaluate technology products and new books. Other articles focus on particular countries or regions; specific languages; translation and localization training pro-grams; the uses of language technology in specific industries — a wide array of current topics from the world of multilingual language, technology and business.

If you are interested in reaching an international audience in the best way possible, you need to subscribe to MultiLingual.

An invitation to subscribe to

Subscribe to MultiLingual atwww.multilingual.com/subscribe